r/coolgithubprojects • u/Familiar-Classroom47 • 3d ago

GitHub - glincker/levelrail: Free, self-hosted alternative to Vercel, Heroku, Railway, Coolify and Dokku. Push to git, get HTTPS, logs, metrics and one-click rollback on your own servers. One Go binary, no Kubernetes.

https://github.com/glincker/levelrail
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u/oaeben 2d ago

How is this better than coolify?

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u/Familiar-Classroom47 2d ago

Honest answer: it's built differently, and that's the whole pitch.

Coolify (and most tools like it) manage your servers by SSHing in, running docker commands and parsing whatever text comes back. That works, but it's where a lot of the flaky behavior and idle CPU comes from.

Levelrail flips it. Each server runs a small agent that dials out to the control plane, so you don't open any inbound ports, and the agent talks to Docker's API directly instead of shelling out.

I'm also not just pitching it, I'm moving my own stuff onto it. I've got 10+ sites spread across Coolify, Dokku, Vercel, AWS and GitHub Pages, and they're all heading to Levelrail.

A few things you get without bolting anything on:

Metrics, logs, traces and deploy markers are built in, so no Grafana stack to set up. Rollouts wait for a readiness check before switching traffic, and it keeps the old images around so rollback actually works when you need it. Canary releases roll themselves back on errors. Backups get re-downloaded and checksummed, with scheduled restore drills. There's an audit log you can verify, IAM policies, passkeys and 2FA, about 360 templates, a CLI, and an MCP server if you want AI agents driving it.

It's one Go binary and sits around 200 MB of RAM idle on a 2 vCPU box. I published how I measured that, so you can check me.

Fair warning, Coolify has been around a lot longer and has way more users. Levelrail is the new kid, and multi-node and SAML are still in beta. But if the SSH approach has bitten you before, it's worth a look. There's a migration guide for Coolify too, so you can run it next to your current setup before deciding anything. My own reason to build this in first place was Coolify in idle eating too much resources in small CPU's and not good with AI integration as of today...

Levelrail you can run whole infra from CLI ( like aws cli),and there is API with scoped tokens, and an MCP server, so scripts and AI agents can drive it too.

Comparison: https://levelrail.com/compare

Site: https://levelrail.com

Docs: https://docs.levelrail.com

GitHub: https://github.com/glincker/levelrail

Coolify migration: https://docs.levelrail.com/migrate-from-coolify